Last Years
On 15 October 1589 Pont was appointed by the king one of a commission to try beneficed persons. He was one of those sent by the presbytery of Edinburgh to hold a conference with the king at the Tolbooth on 8 June 1591 regarding the king's objections to reproofs from the pulpit; and replied to the king's claim of sovereign judgment in all things by affirming that there was a judgment above his—namely "God's—put in the hand of the ministry". On 8 December he was deputed, along with other two ministers, to go to Holyrood Palace, when they urged the king to have the Scriptures read at dinner and supper. At the meeting of the assembly at Edinburgh on 21 May 1592 he was appointed one of a committee to work on articles with reference to popery and the authority.
When the Act of Abolition granting pardon to the Earls of Huntly, Angus, Erroll, and other Catholics on certain conditions was on 26 November 1593 communicated by the king to the ministers of Edinburgh, Pont proposed that it should be disannulled rather than revised. He again acted as moderator of the assembly which met in March 1596. On 16 May 1597 he was appointed one of a commission to converse with the king; and he was also a member of the renewed commission in the following year. At the general assembly which met in March 1597–8 he was one of the main supporters of the proposal of the king that the ministry, as the third estate of the realm, should have a vote in parliament.
By the assembly which met at Burntisland on 12 May 1601 Pont was appointed to revise the translation of the Psalms in metre. On 15 November of the following year he was relieved of "ordinary teaching". He died on 8 May 1606, in his eighty-second year, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Cuthbert's, Edinburgh. He had had a tombstone prepared for himself, but this was removed and another set up by his widow, which remained by a privy council decision.
Robert Wodrow stateD that Pont had a "discovery" of Queen Elizabeth's death the same day she died, which he told to James VI. It was attributed either to a revelation or to Pont's knowledge of astrology.
Read more about this topic: Robert Pont
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)